Harare isn’t exactly the seething, angry mass of humanity that the sensationalist TV news reports leads you to expect. The days-long queues of cars and trucks at petrol stations, the sullen masses lined up in a vain effort to withdraw their rightful wages from the banks: if all that was true at one time, it no longer seems so now — on the surface at least.
The place is more like a ghost town — sullen, indeed, but passive. The revolution is still a long way away.
The simple fact is that, having done their damndest to make things happen, to squeeze the last drops out of the unwilling petrol pumps and try to make supermarket shelves yield God’s bounty, the struggle to survive has exhausted all will to resist. There is no petrol. There is virtually nothing in the stores — in fact the very stores themselves, those that are still open, make a half-hearted show of a desire to do business where there is none to be done.
The taxis, once seething in and out of the main taxi rank, are just not there anymore. The impossible petrol prices made them raise their fares beyond a level where any ordinary person could countenance boarding one. There is no petrol anyway. The taxi owners have cut their losses if they can and sold off their vehicles. The people take the only option left to them and walk the dreary hours to and from work. At least keep up appearances that there is some value in going in to work. It’s not as if everyone has a job anyway.
Even if you are able to rescue some of your money from the banks, its value declines right before your eyes. What you could buy for Z$10 000 last week now costs Z$100 000.
Inflation, that strange word beloved of George Soros, Allan Greenspan, Tito Mboweni and the white people overseas, is a vague and unaccountable beast until it comes and sits in your own backyard. Inflation in Zimbabwe is about to overtake the 1 000% mark. And those are zeros that suddenly sit pregnant in your own pocket, and count for something, rather than a string of nothings.
The facts stare you in the face. A couple of months ago my friends got their car stolen. It was a terrible blow, as any theft always is, but they thought they would get over it. After all, theft happens to all of us every day. Besides, they were insured.
Forget it. Insurance (which like banking is big business in Zimbabwe) was to prove no comfort to them whatsoever. Because of inflation.
Think about it. They had insured their car for Z$5-million (a tidy sum in anyone’s books). When they put in their claim, with all the right police forms and everything, they got their Z$5-million back without a problem. The problem was that the car, by this time, was worth Z$20-million due to inflation. The five mil that they got back in their pockets (with the usual snot, traane and agonising waste of time that the insurance companies impose on the loyal customer) was worse than worthless to them. The only thing that they could buy for that money at that stage was possibly a bicycle.
So it was back to the drawing board and just fork out and get another car. This time, don’t bother to insure it. Your Z$500-million car just ain’t going to be worth a bag of beans tomorrow.
But all of this is true. All of it is really happening — not in Mexico, not in Argentina, but right here in Southern Africa. While South Africa, proud engine of the ‘African renaissance”, looks on with quiet, diplomatic reserve, Zimbabwe is strangling to death.
Zimbabwe (or Rhodesia as it was then) used to be a net exporter of agricultural goods. Today it is cravenly applying to Zambia, its poverty-stricken neighbour to the north, for subsidised maize. Even if Zambia had excess corn to supply (which it doesn’t), Uncle Bob Mugabe wouldn’t have the ready cash to pay for it. Payment would have to be deferred. (Although Uncle Bob and his immediate family have plenty of personal disposable cash to spend on foreign trips when they feel like it. Which is frequently.)
Yes, all of the personal disaster stories are true. Black women, especially in the rural areas, are raped as a matter of course by the ruling party’s storm troopers, in order to keep the electorate in line. In this respect, New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) rules are being stringently enforced, I suppose. In any case, Nepad’s leading lights have failed to call for any commission of inquiry under the same terms that they would demand when there are witch-hunts in their own backyard. Nepad’s rules of accountability are strictly theoretical.
The wheels have come off the Zimbabwean economy, and the South African presidency can do no better than blame it all on the supposed tacit connivance between Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith and British prime minister Harold Wilson way back in 1965. And also on the Lancaster House agreements of 1979, under whose terms power was handed over to the black majority, headed up by one Robert Gabriel Mugabe.
It took 20 years of misrule before the same RG Mugabe started shouting ‘foul”, and claiming that he had been robbed way back then. But what was going on in those intervening 20 years?
I will confess to being somewhat cynical until I actually set foot in free Zimbabwe for the first time in 1986. The rump of Zimbabweans who had clung stubbornly to their precarious exile in England would sit around in London pubs and decry the excesses of Mugabe and the lack of transformation of the settler economy. To be honest, I couldn’t understand why they didn’t just go home and get down to work.
But arriving in Harare back then, I was pleasantly surprised to find a thriving country that seemed to hold up a beacon of reconciliation and progress that a future, free South Africa might conceivably be persuaded to emulate.
The economy was ticking along nicely, food was aplenty, there were even nice touches like a busy fashion industry, spawned in the days of the country’s isolation through sanctions, when Smith and his gang declared a successful ‘go it alone” policy. Heck, you could get a pair of shoes made in Harare for next to nothing — and they would be of good quality, too.
More than this: you couldn’t walk down the street without bumping into a complete stranger who insisted on telling you how they had put the past behind them. An elderly white man introduced me to his driver/houseboy as his ‘comrade”. ‘We are all comrades now,” the white man said. ‘We all lost a lot in the war, but we have got over it. We had to.”
You could have knocked me down with a feather.
Is this the same place that now cannot even produce milk or maize to feed itself? Is this the same city of deserted streets and non-existent minibus taxis? Is this the same country where the president can officially hijack the national airline and send what little is left of the economy into further tatters?
And is all this the fault of what our own, South African president would like us to call rapacious foreign settlers? Or do our black brothers and sisters in the ruling Zanu-PF (that stands for ‘Patriotic Front”, if your recall) also have something to account for in this chaos?
The manner of Zimbabwe’s sinister drift, and the way our senior politicians are apologising for it, does not bode well for an honest, sustainable future for the rest of the region — including our own beloved country.
However, in Nepad we trust.